Identifying all victims could take months

By Stephen Gibbs in DenpasarOctober 16 2002

It may be months before all those killed in the Bali bomb blasts are formally identified, two of Australia's leading forensic pathologists warned yesterday.

But John Hilton, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine, a laboratory service based in Glebe, and Christopher Griffiths, head of The Westmead Dental School, have already started work at Sanglah Hospital, Denpasar.

Associate Professor Griffiths, who helped identify the victims of the backpacker murderer Ivan Milat and the Thredbo landslide, arrived with Professor Hilton as part of an Australian Federal Police disaster victim team.

The team, which includes police officers, fingerprint technicians, anthropologists and other forensic experts, will help Indonesian authorities identify the dead.

The identification system they use is straightforward and, hopefully, definitive.

Professor Hilton said: "The process is ... get as much and as good information as you can [about the victim] - what they looked like and what they were wearing when they died.

"You match that up with information gained from the post-mortem examination and then at the end of the day you hope you've got a reasonably certain identification of most, if not all, of the people who were killed.

"It all sounds terribly simple, and in the best of possible world it is, but there are always problems."

There have already been problems at Sanglah's primitive morgue. There were reports yesterday that up to four different families had identified the same victim as their relative.

To avoid such problems the team will use victim identification forms far more detailed than those used until now by volunteers, forms that Professor Griffiths helped develop as the Interpol standard.

Friends or family help fill out a yellow "ante mortem" form that asks for basic information and contact details for those who could identify a victim by sight.

After a post-mortem examination a pink form is completed in fine detail.

"It's a long and tedious process," Professor Griffiths said, "especially where there has been fire, which makes things like fingerprints difficult to identify."

If visual identification or fingerprinting is not sufficient, DNA comparisons will be made.

"It's a very difficult thing for families to realise how long this process [will take]. I know it is very difficult for families to come to grips with it," Professor Griffiths said. "There's always a lot of pressure to speed up a process that can't be speeded up.

"Often ... we don't identify everyone for a couple of months down the track."

Other countries with expert forensic experience, including the United States and Germany, have also offered help.

"We're here to help the authorities in anything they ask for," Professor Hilton said.